Building upward not outward is the answer, By Shanee Shiloh
“Yehoshua Gutman, co-owner of the Gutman-Assif Architects office and a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design’s architecture department, argues that the state should stop releasing land for development around the cities. The future, he contends, lies in building up the city centers. “Make use of existing physical infrastructures and stop spreading outward,” Gutman urges, adding that building up in the cities isn’t the planning horror story that people claim it to be.”
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Brave New World, By Yuval Saar
“In the age of Facebook, so the saying goes, if it wasn’t photographed, it didn’t happen. In the age of Instagram – an iPhone app that has garnered seven million users in less than a year – if it wasn’t photographed with a clear filter, low resolution and burned border, it didn’t happen….Everyone is taking pictures, all the time. There’s even a new name for it: ‘iPhonographers’ – people who take pictures with iPhones,” says Talia Zeligman, a graduate of the Hadassah Academic College photography department and an independent consultant who lectures in the visual communications department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design…At the last end-of-year exhibition of the Bezalel photography department, Gilad Baram showed his final project, entitled “Photoscape” – an international, interactive work based on video communication via the Internet….Just over a month ago, Dan Madorsky, also from Bezalel, exhibited his final project, which was also related to photography as it appears on the Internet.”
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Knowledge is Power, By Yuval Saar
“A new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates crafts that have been lost over the years. Israeli-born curator Daniel Charny says the future is in your hands…The son of Israeli poet T. Carmi, Charny was born in Jerusalem in 1966. He studied industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design there, and has a master’s degree in industrial design from London’s Royal College of Art, where he is now a senior lecturer.”
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I’ve got me under your skin, By Ellie Armon Azoulay
“In his most personal and revealing exhibition to date, Gal Wertman offers figures that create a shimmering twilight zone between the body and what’s outside it….’When I went to Bezalel, it was like the closing of a circle for me.’”
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Environment / The people want spatial justice,  By Esther Zandberg
“When the people demand social justice they are also demanding a revolutionary change in Israeli planning policy….A multidisciplinary think tank, headed by Dr. Emily Silverman of the Technion, is one of several teams formed as part of the alternative committee, and includes dozens of geographers, architects, urban planners, transportation experts, and legal experts, representatives of social justice and equal rights in planning organizations and others. The team discusses key issues that prompted the protest: lands, housing, planning, as well as transportation – a key area that has a far-reaching impact on equitable distribution of space and the division of resources.  Over the last few days, the team has been immersed in discussions over the Salameh document, drawn up by teachers, graduates and architecture students at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, in conjunction with professionals in planning and architecture.”
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Ghosts in the Living Room, By Rebecca Schischa
“There’s a dizzying feeling as you step into “Living Room,” Israeli artist Maya Zack’s art installation at New York’s Jewish Museum — not least because of the colored 3-D glasses you’re invited to put on at the entrance. “Living Room,” which opened at the museum July 31, is an audiovisual installation composed of four large-scale, computer-generated images showing a Jewish family’s apartment in 1930s Berlin. It is Zack’s reconstruction of the home of Manfred Nomburg, a German-born Jew who fled Nazi Germany for Israel in 1938, leaving behind his parents and a younger brother….The artist, born in 1976 and trained at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, has said that the two pieces were inspired by a trip she took to see her grandmother’s childhood home in Kosice, a city in Slovakia. Unable to enter the house, Zack took to imagining the interior.”
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Israeli, Polish youth connect through art
“Poland and Israel are historically and dramatically linked and modern day stories cannot escape this past.  Adina Bar-On, an Israeli performance artist, a lecturer in the Art Department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and a frequent guest of cultural events in Poland, felt the need to reconnect the youth of both countries in order to confront the myths and bias that are associated with the two countries.”
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The future of Israeli design, now on display, By Yuval Saar
“What could possibly be done that is new at an exhibition of works of graduates of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design visual communications department – especially after the successful exhibition curated last year by Yael Burstein in the same space?  On the surface there is nothing revolutionary about what the curator, designer Michal Sahar, did in breaking down the walls between the classrooms. Maybe it is even banal. But Sahar has created one of the most impressive exhibition spaces in the country, one not inferior in quality to museum spaces here and abroad.”
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